Johann Hari was a very highly regarded columnist and journalist at the London Independent and the Huffington Post until, in 2011, he was suspended from The Independent after charges of plagiarism. He was also accused of making improper edits to several of his critics' Wikipedia pages under a pseudonym. He later left the Independent.
Yesterday he spoke to Matt about his new book Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, which has been positively reviewed by Elton John, Stephen Fry, Bill Maher and Russell Brand amongst many others.
It is now 100 years since drugs were first banned in the United States. To mark the centenary Hari spent three-years and travelled thirty thousand miles to research his book. What he found, he says, is that more and more people all over the world are beginning to recognize “three startling truths: Drugs are not what we think they are. Addiction is not what we think it is. And the drug war has very different motives to the ones we have seen on our TV screens for so long”.
